Aboriginal Community Leadership

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN (15:07): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation a question regarding Aboriginal South Australians and community leadership.

Leave granted.

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN: South Australia's Strategic Plan target 28 seeks to increase the number of Aboriginal South Australians participating in community leadership and in community leadership development programs. In the South Australia's Strategic Plan progress report of 2012, the audit committee reported that the number of Aboriginal people recorded as undertaking leadership development activities in 2010-11 was substantially lower than the number recorded for the 2007-2008 baseline year.

Based on these figures, the audit committee has concluded that the achievement of the target was unlikely and, of more concern, rated the progress in this area as negative movement. Can the minister explain to the council why South Australia has recorded a negative movement in this area and advise the council what measures the government is taking to address the failure to achieve the target?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation) (15:08): I thank the honourable member for his most important question. The government is not embarrassed by setting aspirational targets, particularly in policy areas where we need to stretch ourselves to improve on past practices of all governments in recent times. Of course, the honourable member may not be aware of, and he may not have read, the paper published by the Premier and the ALP leading up to the last election on building a stronger, better, fairer South Australia.

Perhaps he should, because in that document we set out our promises for the election campaign and we spoke about the development of, for example, our Aboriginal regional authority policy. That concept did not just come out of anywhere: it came out of a vision to actually develop and provide abilities for governance and leadership in Aboriginal communities.

It is clearly an area that has been lacking, and this is not just inside of government of course; this is actually outside of government in their own communities. That lack has been recognised across the state, and so our policy is to actually encourage, and we are doing that with a trail of four sites currently: I think Kaurna, Port Augusta, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri are our four sites.

They have met initially to map out how they will proceed into the future, but the concept is essentially this: we will write down a plan of how we will work with Aboriginal communities who can actually testify to us as a government that they represent their communities. We will work through several stages of that. Of course, one stage will be recognition, acknowledgement and consultation.

At the other end there will be a stage where regional authorities have got themselves to an ability where they can acquit to government properly audited accounts for expenditure, and we may in fact contract some of the services that we wish to deliver to those organisations once they have met the KPIs that set themselves up as an organisation that can: (a) speak for community, and (b) deliver appropriate services and be acquitted appropriately. So, we are working with those communities.

In addition, we are also bringing in the involvement of our three universities to make sure that education is a key part of this process—not just education in certificates III and IV level in governance, but actually access to higher education in terms of nation building, or whatever area of education that a person coming through this program might find attractive to them.

We want to make sure that there are clear pathways towards higher education through our regional authority engagement process for those who want to take it up and become the future leaders of Aboriginal communities in South Australia and, rather than governments doing for people and doing for communities, encouraging communities to do things for themselves and to take responsibilities on board.